I don’t do self-reflection very well. I’ve always been pretty content to just be me. I don’t know if it’s because I’m afraid to look below this house of horrors mirrored existence or because I’m lazy. Also emotional breakthroughs feel like childbirth to me—they’re painful and exhausting and I’m stuck caring for a…

Last night I attended a community organizing event in Portland, Maine, hosted by Dispatch Magazine. It took place at Urban Farms Fermentory, a self-described “experimental urban farm, fermentation factory, and community engagement hub.” They sell growlers of kombucha.

I have a sun inside my chest. As far as I can tell, it’s been there since birth. It’s grown larger over the years, expanding in fits and starts until it’s as much a part of me as bone and blood and meat.

I’m braiding the hair of a woman who disinvited me from her wedding when it occurs to me I’m not good at boundaries. She’s seated on a twin bed with a white, raised-pattern coverlet while I stand behind her, thin blond hair limp in my outstretched fingers. The chatter from our mutual group of friends, gathered to…

I’m written out. I’ll be spending the month of July drawing or painting my depression and sharing my really very quite good art on here and every other social media platform. Share yours if you feel so inspired.

I’ve never been very good at protecting my own privacy. My long-acknowledged and most recognizable commodities are interjecting unwanted opinions and oversharing, often at the same time. Those qualities have not improved since I started blogging on a sporadic basis. Somehow, though, in the midst of this last round of…

With no way of gauging accuracy, I’d guestimate that 90 percent of my acquaintances don’t know I’ve struggled with major depression and acute anxiety for the last decade or so. On good days, of which I have many, I’m a tightly clenched fistful of bravado and a tinder keg full of opinions. I’m loud. I laugh a lot. I’ll…

Last week Erin Andrews was awarded $55 million of the $75 million civil lawsuit she filed against a stalker who secretly recorded her naked body as she stayed at a Nashville Marriott hotel; the owner of the hotel was also included in the suit. As the sportscaster openly wept during the retelling of her experience, an…

Tomorrow, before the turkey and the stuffing and the pecan pie and the noodles and the green beans and the cranberry sauce and the mashed potatoes, as you sit at the heavily-laden table with your loved ones and your sometimes-loved ones and weird Aunt Pat, when you start grasping at empty air in the hopes of coming up…

It’s sometime before dawn – zero dark thirty, in battlefield parlance. The air smells of burning tires, rotting garbage and gunpowder. Four soldiers flank a hotel entrance and hear the faint sound of a radio playing a pop song on the other side. On three, they break the door down and rush in. Bright flashes blind…

A few weeks after I’d been unceremoniously fired from a temp job working at the Metropolitan Washington Airports Authority (MWAA), I found a job working for an event planner who lived on my street. In MWAA’s defense, I’d so vociferously trash talked the organization while working there, they had no other recourse than…

On January 27, 1991, at a record-release party for the rap duo Bytches With Problems in Hollywood, producer/rapper/then-N.W.A. member Dr. Dre brutally attacked Dee Barnes, the host of a well-known Fox show about hip-hop called Pump It Up! Dre was reportedly angry about a Pump It Up! segment hosted by Barnes that aired…

A few years ago, when I was underemployed and working for a chain-smoking 63-year old woman who, at the end of my first day as a full time employee, asked me if I “knew what the fuck I was doing,” (hint: I did not) I wrote something dumb about the evils of romantic comedies. It was “published” on a website created by…